Digitaltrends on next-gen optical discs

From Simon Cohen at ditaltrends.

This is pretty exciting actually, 1.6 petabits of data on an optical disc, that is like 200,000 GB. You could have basically uncompressed movies (which would look amazing) and backup would be incredible.

Still this is mostly pie in the sky as they haven’t created consumer grade lasers that would go through 100 layers of disc, and since everyone is so into streaming.

So it likely won’t be consumer or be used for movies, which will keep it from being cheap, and it if it too expensive as storage there is no point, though I still would love to have it.

Xbox One X UHD blu-ray player has issues with seemless branching

So I was trying to watch the Martian extended edition UHD blu-ray on my xbox one x, but every time it hot an extended scene the audio goes out of sync. You can get it back by cycling through the available audio or doing a quick rewind, but it is super frustrating. I googled and Microsoft Communities has some posts about it.

I also wrote to their support on twitter. This is certainly an issue Microsoft needs to look into, as no review mentions the issue so it seems to be xbox exclusive, and seens to be a problem with seemless branching.

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So I just got the Blackhawk Down Extended Edition UHD Blu-ray, and just like Ridley’s Scott’s The Martian Extended Edition Blu-Ray, the extended edition glitches whenever their is a new scene. The audio cuts out and it pauses. The Martian was actually slightly worse in that the audio went out of sync and i had to fast forward to get it back in sync. And the regular bluray does play seemless branching correctly.

I called xbox support, and they seem to know about the issue, and know it is software based, but can’t escalate it to where it will actually be fixed. So everyone who runs into this issue please report it.

The xbox one x blu-ray player is broken and needs to be fixed, but they aren’t going to do anything about it unless enough people report it.

The Digital Bits has the first news on 4K Blu-Ray and it is called Ultra HD Blu-ray

Bill Hunt at Digital Bits has the first official word on 4K Blu-Ray, which will be known as Ultra HD Blu-Ray.

This is really exciting news. Everything has been moving to digital delivery of late, with higher compression, less quality and less features, but it is good to know that there will be a 4K disc based format which will deliver the best quality.

The only bad news is that it does not seem to include a 3D spec, which is likely a bandwidth issue, though it will be able to do 60P (hello Avatar in 60P). The spec has not been finalized but will use H.265, and will have a 66GB dual layer and 100GB 3 layer formats, and can even do 10 bit color and a wider color gamut as well as high dynamic range! It also will have a digital copy process to make local copies to a hard drive, likely in a specifically designed player.

Now I won’t be moving to this anytime soon, as I just got a 65″ 1080 display, and didn’t even consider 4K for lack of content and not knowing how 1080 will look blown up to 4K (I am assuming not good).